Acktion
GrumpyOldDude
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2011
- Posts
- 4,396
Heyla, Philos. I hear you. More, I understand.
I've been down some pretty rough roads. Being diagnosed with Parkinson's and classified disabled, then my wife becoming disabled, losing everything down to and including our house unable to pay the bills, and then losing my mother to lymphatic cancer wasn't a banner year for me. The year I lost (in chronological order) my 23-year-old cat, my wife, my stepmother, and then my father all within nine months wasn't so great either. When Covid broke, I was in an informational vacuum and then when I did start finding out what was up, I was puzzled by the people who had issues with the whole "shelter in place" because that had been my life for a decade before Covid made it sexy.
But, the thing is, for those of us afflicted with the body chemistry that feed clinical depression, it doesn't really matter how bad things are or how good things are. Arguably I was something of a golden child with a largely idyllic childhood. (If, that is, you can look past childhood illness, being molested by some neighbor kids, and being bullied up to and including being waterboarded.) Pretty much anything I attempted to do, I did reasonably well without putting forth noticeable effort. Academics. Music. Art. Athletics... well, there I did have to put forth effort that all but olympic hopefuls would have considered insane just to catch up. But, from the outside looking in, everything was copacetic.
And, yet, I had suicidal ideations and exhibited self-destructive behaviors. And, when I did get help (250mg of Elavil and twice-weekly therapy) got a lot of "what's the matter with you? What do you have to be depressed about?"
Which is the damn dumbest thing you can do to someone fighting clinical depression.
And yet, in a culture of rugged individualism, that is what the overwhelming majority of people do. Starting at an early age. "What are you crying for? You want me to give you something to cry about?!" What? You never heard that from parents or some other adult? What about "crybaby?" Really? You never heard that from your age cohort?
Well, you are exceptionally rare. And lucky.
The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people are bad at dealing with emotion. Theirs or anyone elses. They don't know what to do with them because we are taught that there are only a very limited number of acceptable outlets. And especially anything that is considered negative. You can laugh and joke and that's okay. But, if tears are streaming down your cheeks, people that were perfectly happy being around when you were telling jokes start edging away.
Or else, they try to fix you.
Bitch, I'm not a broken toaster. You can't just whip out a screwdriver and soldering iron, reconnect the heating element wire that came loose, put the cover back on, and call it a day. The human body doesn't work that way. The mind and emotions, even less so.
Want me to let you in on a little secret of the counseling profession? Roughly 80% of their training is focused on being able to shut the fuck up and listen.
Why? Because the overwhelming majority of issues they encounter are from people who have bottled shit up and had it fester until it poisons their soul. The first step is learning to let it out safely. Safely for themselves and for people around them.
Anger, for example. Anger is not negative. Neither is it positive. It just is. Exists. Curb stomping some jerk is negative. (At least in the overwhelming majority of cases.) And, yet, every hero ever lifted up as an example has been motivated to some extent by anger, just channeled in positive ways.
Sadness is not negative. Neither is it positive. It just is. Exists. There are positive and negative ways of channeling it.
Talking about it is the crucial first step. Lancing the festering boil to allow the poison to drain.
Popping pills is never going to be an instant fix. But, when (like me) you have a chemical imbalance, they are not a bad thing. Think about it. If you have a broken leg, is it "weakness" to use a crutch?
But, those two are just the beginning of the trail. What next?
I've stuck my oar in a couple of places that I think might be germane here. Not by any means comprehensive. They're pretty long and this is already going to bring the "tldr" types out of the woodwork to try to belittle what I'm saying based on nothing but the length is too much for their attention span, so I'll just link the two that I think are most relevant.
https://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=93398872&postcount=65
https://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=92293226&postcount=16
About the only thing that I would caution is to make sure that whatever else you are doing is not, in effect, just masking the symptoms without treating the disease. It is imperative that you keep talking, keep dealing with it rather than always avoiding.
At the risk of getting a little metaphysical for some tastes, I've picked up a couple of tricks that may or may not work for some. Unfortunatley, I don't understand it well enough to explain it any better than what I'm about to say.
I have this mental image of a puddle. That puddle is the negative shit that I don't really want to deal with. So, I do what any rational, reasonable person does. And I step around the puddle.
The only problem is, negative shit keeps collecting there. And the puddle gets bigger. And I keep stepping around it. And it keeps getting bigger. And I keep stepping around it. Until eventually, it is a lake that fills the vault of my mind to the walls, so that I can't get through that particular room of my house without getting my feet wet.
There is this vogue thing called Primal Scream therapy. It's the closest I know to explain what I do, except I don't make a sound.
And... Well, I've got some long-standing issues with the Sun. Not knocking anyone who has an affinity for it. And even with my issues, I know we really need it. But, I've always had more of an affinity for the night, for the moon and stars. Although my real affinity has always been for the storm. A stormy night? Fuckin' perfect. For me.
So, when I get to feeling overwhelmed, on a stormy night (when I can get one, or just night when I can't), I walk outside barefoot into the grass. When I had a tree available, I would walk to the base of the tree, my bare feet between its roots, and put my hands on the rough bark. These days, with no tree readily available, I just stand in the grass and spread my arms as wide as possible.
Please, bear with me. This is where it gets really hard to explain.
I inhale for a seven-count through my nose, envisioning drawing in something positive that specifically answers a negative in the black morass of my soul. As an example, my sense of loss and, yeah, abandonment by my late wife, I answer my envisioning drawing in some of my happiest memories of our two and half decades together, of her love for me and acceptance of me.
I'll admit that I don't know that would really matter for anyone else. But, for me I've found it's necessary to deal with the specific negative rather than just envisioning a generic positive or a positive that is only loosely related to the sticky, black morass engulfing me.
Then I exhale through the mouth for an eleven count. Although, exhale doesn't really do it justice. With my head tipped back, I put the energy behind that exhale as if I were trying to scream loud enough to be heard on the moon. Back a couple of decades ago, I would actually scream. But, the neighbors tend to take a rather dim view of random screaming for no purpose they can ascertain at two o'clock in the morning. So, I learned to somehow relax my vocal cords so that no sound comes out while pushing from the diaphragm as if I were screaming.
And I envision some specific negative, the same negative that I addressed by drawing in a positive to off-set, I've identified in that dark, swirling abyss vomiting out like lightning going up from me to the storm... or maybe fuel for the fires burning in distant suns that we see as stars.
And then inhale another positive for another seven. And soundlessly scream another negative for eleven. And again. And again. And again.
At my worst, I was out there for about forty-five minutes to an hour feeding the storm raging within me into the storm raging in the heavens above me. And when I came in, I was as exhausted as if I'd run a five-minute mile back several decades ago, and my throat was as sore as if I'd been bellowing to be heard over an audience of twenty-thousand from right about the same time. I slept for thirty-six hours, the first real sleep I'd had since waking to find my late wife no longer inhabiting her corporeal shell ten months earlier.
Any road, I don't know that I actually contributed a damn thing at all useful, or even worth the electrons they are typed in. And I'm sure the "tldr" types are already frothing at the keyboard. So, I'll shut the hell up and cede the floor to someone else who may have something better worth contributing.
I've been down some pretty rough roads. Being diagnosed with Parkinson's and classified disabled, then my wife becoming disabled, losing everything down to and including our house unable to pay the bills, and then losing my mother to lymphatic cancer wasn't a banner year for me. The year I lost (in chronological order) my 23-year-old cat, my wife, my stepmother, and then my father all within nine months wasn't so great either. When Covid broke, I was in an informational vacuum and then when I did start finding out what was up, I was puzzled by the people who had issues with the whole "shelter in place" because that had been my life for a decade before Covid made it sexy.
But, the thing is, for those of us afflicted with the body chemistry that feed clinical depression, it doesn't really matter how bad things are or how good things are. Arguably I was something of a golden child with a largely idyllic childhood. (If, that is, you can look past childhood illness, being molested by some neighbor kids, and being bullied up to and including being waterboarded.) Pretty much anything I attempted to do, I did reasonably well without putting forth noticeable effort. Academics. Music. Art. Athletics... well, there I did have to put forth effort that all but olympic hopefuls would have considered insane just to catch up. But, from the outside looking in, everything was copacetic.
And, yet, I had suicidal ideations and exhibited self-destructive behaviors. And, when I did get help (250mg of Elavil and twice-weekly therapy) got a lot of "what's the matter with you? What do you have to be depressed about?"
Which is the damn dumbest thing you can do to someone fighting clinical depression.
And yet, in a culture of rugged individualism, that is what the overwhelming majority of people do. Starting at an early age. "What are you crying for? You want me to give you something to cry about?!" What? You never heard that from parents or some other adult? What about "crybaby?" Really? You never heard that from your age cohort?
Well, you are exceptionally rare. And lucky.
The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people are bad at dealing with emotion. Theirs or anyone elses. They don't know what to do with them because we are taught that there are only a very limited number of acceptable outlets. And especially anything that is considered negative. You can laugh and joke and that's okay. But, if tears are streaming down your cheeks, people that were perfectly happy being around when you were telling jokes start edging away.
Or else, they try to fix you.
Bitch, I'm not a broken toaster. You can't just whip out a screwdriver and soldering iron, reconnect the heating element wire that came loose, put the cover back on, and call it a day. The human body doesn't work that way. The mind and emotions, even less so.
Want me to let you in on a little secret of the counseling profession? Roughly 80% of their training is focused on being able to shut the fuck up and listen.
Why? Because the overwhelming majority of issues they encounter are from people who have bottled shit up and had it fester until it poisons their soul. The first step is learning to let it out safely. Safely for themselves and for people around them.
Anger, for example. Anger is not negative. Neither is it positive. It just is. Exists. Curb stomping some jerk is negative. (At least in the overwhelming majority of cases.) And, yet, every hero ever lifted up as an example has been motivated to some extent by anger, just channeled in positive ways.
Sadness is not negative. Neither is it positive. It just is. Exists. There are positive and negative ways of channeling it.
Talking about it is the crucial first step. Lancing the festering boil to allow the poison to drain.
Popping pills is never going to be an instant fix. But, when (like me) you have a chemical imbalance, they are not a bad thing. Think about it. If you have a broken leg, is it "weakness" to use a crutch?
But, those two are just the beginning of the trail. What next?
I've stuck my oar in a couple of places that I think might be germane here. Not by any means comprehensive. They're pretty long and this is already going to bring the "tldr" types out of the woodwork to try to belittle what I'm saying based on nothing but the length is too much for their attention span, so I'll just link the two that I think are most relevant.
https://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=93398872&postcount=65
https://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=92293226&postcount=16
About the only thing that I would caution is to make sure that whatever else you are doing is not, in effect, just masking the symptoms without treating the disease. It is imperative that you keep talking, keep dealing with it rather than always avoiding.
At the risk of getting a little metaphysical for some tastes, I've picked up a couple of tricks that may or may not work for some. Unfortunatley, I don't understand it well enough to explain it any better than what I'm about to say.
I have this mental image of a puddle. That puddle is the negative shit that I don't really want to deal with. So, I do what any rational, reasonable person does. And I step around the puddle.
The only problem is, negative shit keeps collecting there. And the puddle gets bigger. And I keep stepping around it. And it keeps getting bigger. And I keep stepping around it. Until eventually, it is a lake that fills the vault of my mind to the walls, so that I can't get through that particular room of my house without getting my feet wet.
There is this vogue thing called Primal Scream therapy. It's the closest I know to explain what I do, except I don't make a sound.
And... Well, I've got some long-standing issues with the Sun. Not knocking anyone who has an affinity for it. And even with my issues, I know we really need it. But, I've always had more of an affinity for the night, for the moon and stars. Although my real affinity has always been for the storm. A stormy night? Fuckin' perfect. For me.
So, when I get to feeling overwhelmed, on a stormy night (when I can get one, or just night when I can't), I walk outside barefoot into the grass. When I had a tree available, I would walk to the base of the tree, my bare feet between its roots, and put my hands on the rough bark. These days, with no tree readily available, I just stand in the grass and spread my arms as wide as possible.
Please, bear with me. This is where it gets really hard to explain.
I inhale for a seven-count through my nose, envisioning drawing in something positive that specifically answers a negative in the black morass of my soul. As an example, my sense of loss and, yeah, abandonment by my late wife, I answer my envisioning drawing in some of my happiest memories of our two and half decades together, of her love for me and acceptance of me.
I'll admit that I don't know that would really matter for anyone else. But, for me I've found it's necessary to deal with the specific negative rather than just envisioning a generic positive or a positive that is only loosely related to the sticky, black morass engulfing me.
Then I exhale through the mouth for an eleven count. Although, exhale doesn't really do it justice. With my head tipped back, I put the energy behind that exhale as if I were trying to scream loud enough to be heard on the moon. Back a couple of decades ago, I would actually scream. But, the neighbors tend to take a rather dim view of random screaming for no purpose they can ascertain at two o'clock in the morning. So, I learned to somehow relax my vocal cords so that no sound comes out while pushing from the diaphragm as if I were screaming.
And I envision some specific negative, the same negative that I addressed by drawing in a positive to off-set, I've identified in that dark, swirling abyss vomiting out like lightning going up from me to the storm... or maybe fuel for the fires burning in distant suns that we see as stars.
And then inhale another positive for another seven. And soundlessly scream another negative for eleven. And again. And again. And again.
At my worst, I was out there for about forty-five minutes to an hour feeding the storm raging within me into the storm raging in the heavens above me. And when I came in, I was as exhausted as if I'd run a five-minute mile back several decades ago, and my throat was as sore as if I'd been bellowing to be heard over an audience of twenty-thousand from right about the same time. I slept for thirty-six hours, the first real sleep I'd had since waking to find my late wife no longer inhabiting her corporeal shell ten months earlier.
Any road, I don't know that I actually contributed a damn thing at all useful, or even worth the electrons they are typed in. And I'm sure the "tldr" types are already frothing at the keyboard. So, I'll shut the hell up and cede the floor to someone else who may have something better worth contributing.
